Subhas Chandra Bose passed the elite civil service exam, then refused the job
Subhas Chandra Bose sailed to England at his father's urging and did brilliantly in the crucial first Indian Civil Service exam. He then declined the routine final test, calling nationalism the higher calling. His path led from Gandhi's Congress to Hitler's Berlin and a Japanese-backed army, leaving a deeply divided legacy.
Bose was born on 23 January 1897 in Cuttack, the ninth of fourteen children of a prosperous, government-loyal lawyer. His father chose an English-medium mission school where no Indian language was taught, while at home only Bengali was spoken and his mother told stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. As a teenager he took to Indian dress and the ideas of Swami Vivekananda, and once vanished for months on a search for a guru with a close friend, alarming his family.
At Presidency College, Calcutta, he was expelled in 1916 after a professor accused of insulting Indian culture was assaulted by students; a college servant said he had seen Bose among those running away. Readmitted elsewhere, he took a first in philosophy, then went to Cambridge in 1919 while preparing for the civil service. Returning in 1921, he joined Gandhi's Indian National Congress, sided with its more socialist wing under Jawaharlal Nehru, and became Congress president in 1938.
Clashes with Gandhi and other leaders, over federation, his flexible view of nonviolence and his desire for more personal power, forced him out. In April 1941 he reached Nazi Germany, which gave guarded support and helped raise a 3,000-strong legion from Indian prisoners of war; there he was first hailed as Netaji, respected leader. He met Hitler once, in 1942, and travelled by German and then Japanese submarine to Sumatra in 1943.
With Japanese backing he rebuilt the Indian National Army from prisoners taken at Singapore, but the Japanese thought him militarily unskilled, and British Indian forces turned back the push on India in 1944 and 1945. Bose died of burns after a plane crash in Taiwan on 18 August 1945, though some Indians refused to believe it. Many admire his defiance; others point to his alliance with fascism and silence over Nazi antisemitism.
Source: Subhas Chandra Bose
